Ode to Friendship

... the Ayatol ah Khomeini? Could you
be friends with such a person?
Are they free to be friends? You can be friends only with someone who is free. Do you see what I
mean, there are al sorts of implications here. [pause] It could be that someone who is legal y a slave is
capable of friendship but he would not, by virtue of his being a slave, be able to exercise it, he wouldn't
be free to exercise it, or to actualise the potential to be a friend that he has.
Anyway, it is an interesting association between these two words friend and free, and '-ship' of course, I
didn't look it up but it is an old Anglo-Saxon suffix... signifying an abstract quality, the quality of being a
friend: friendship. It is also in worship, worship is worth-ship, it is ascribing worth- to something.
Subhuti: You set out by making a crucial distinction between what you cal the modern sentiment of
friendship and this older understanding of the...
S: Wel , usual y we would distinguish between love and friendship, but you feel the sentiment of friend-
ship towards your friend but you would very rarely say that you loved your friend, you would be rather
shy of saying that, you might be misunderstood. Doctor Johnson, it is interesting to note, in his
conversation and his writings often speaks of loving his friends. He tells his friends quite frankly that he
loves them. That is the language he uses, that is the expression he uses, which people would hesitate
to use that sort of language now. I mean one wouldn't usually say: "I really do love him". You say: "I
real y like him; He's a good chap" but you wouldn't say that "I love him", you would quite easily say "I
love her", but not "I love him". But that was not the usage in Johnson's day. I don't think he was
exceptional y eccentric in his usage. People stil used the word 'love' in connection with friendship, and
in that way friendship did mean the love of your friend, or the relationship of love with your friend.
Needless to say, in those sort of pre-psychoanalytical days 'love' in this context had no sexual
implications at al as far as one can see. But the word 'love' was used.
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Doctor Samuel Johnson's "An Ode to Friendship" Seminar
Page 1 Mangala: So what has happened? ...sexual y...
Subhuti: Yes, what has happened and why?
S: Wel , perhaps that's something we can't go into now. It might have something to do with the
Industrial Revolution. People are blaming it al on that. It might have something to do with, you know,
the whole ideology, the whole ethos of the Victorian Age. Perhaps we should beware of premature
conclusions, but it is interesting that something has happened. Dr Johnson could says in a quite sort of
ful -blooded way that he loved his friends, he could tel Boswel for instance that he loved him without
any sense of embarrassment whatever. But since those days you don't use the word in that sort of way.
Ratnaprabha: Christians still seem to use the word, they seem to speak of a sort of brotherly love.
S: Yes, but even that is qualified as brotherly love to make sure there's no misunderstanding. Dr
Johnson never said to Boswel : "Sir, I have a brotherly love for you", no, he just told Boswell that he
loved him. And there's no trace of sentiment. It wasn't sentimental, it was just straightforward, honest,
you could say manly sort of emotion, more than liking, certainly much more than liking. 'Like', as far as I
know, as far as I remember anyway etymological y is connected with 'lust'. 'Lust' original y meant a
strong liking original y. [laughter]
Subhuti: What about the word 'love'? What's happened with that? What's its etymological...
S: Didn't dare to look that up. [chuckle]
Subhuti: Because that's a real y hard [word(?)] to use.
S: Yes. [pause] Anyway, that's just cleared the decks for action a little bit, hasn't it. So Johnson begins
by saying.... Friendship, It's an ode to friendship. Technical y it's an ode, an ode not in the later
Romantic sense of course quite clearly, but ode in the Latin Classical sense, it is like a sort of Horatian
Ode. It's a series of verses, a series of stanzas rather of some kind. And he starts off simply by this
exclamation: 'Friendship'. It's a bit... you could say it burst from like a bit of an Udana: what a wonderful
thing friendship is, he is saying, so to speak. 'Friendship. Peculiar boon of heaven, The noble mind's
delight and pride.' Now we at. once encounter a change of usage, 'peculiar', what does 'peculiar'
mean? In the 18th century it didn't mean what it means now.
Subhuti: Special...?
S: Special, yes, it's more like special. Special to - . So 'the Peculiar boon of heaven.' Boon means
something like blessing or gift. So friendship is the special gift of heaven. Peculiar here doesn't mean
strange or eccentric or anything of that sort. So friendship: peculiar boon of heaven, the special gift of
heaven itself. Now Johnson was a man who used words very carefully. He said what he thought and he
thought what he said. So if he says that friendship is the special blessing or the special gift of heaven
he real y means it. He means that friendship is something of a heavenly origin or as we would say:
friendship is something spiritual. It isn't something mundane. It isn't something that has gone along with
us, isn't something that has grown up with us from the time of our animal ancestry, animal origins. It's a
higher quality, from a higher sphere as it were, it's a spiritual quality. This is what Johnson is saying. It
only comes from that higher source, it's the peculiar boon of heaven. And you notice he says it's a
boon, it's a gift, it's a blessing. [pause]
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Doctor Samuel Johnson's "An Ode to Friendship" Seminar
Page 1 So 'Friendship! Peculiar boon of heaven, The noble mind's delight and pride.' It's only someone with a
noble mind who can appreciate friendship, who can value friendship as it should be valued. It is the
'delight and pride' of the noble mind. That is of the person of noble mind. Such a person delights in
friendship, delights in having friends, delights in being friends, in manifesting friendship, in fact takes
pride in that. It's, of course a positive pride.
Prasannasiddhi: 'Noble', what connotations would noble have?
S: What do you think it would mean? Obviously it doesn't refer to aristocratic origin. What is a noble
mind? We don't use this term, this adjective much nowadays, do we?
Cittapala: Refined?
Mangala: Someone bent on higher things.
S: Someone bent on higher things. Someone who is not mean, someone who does not stoop to mean
tricks, someone who is not deceitful, someone who is straightforward, someone who is honest,
dignified, upright. At the same time he is intel igent, with self-respect, honourable. Noble means al
these things. One could even say Aryan! Aryan means that. It's an Aryan quality, one might say,
transposing the term into the Buddha's language, so to speak. It's the opposite of slavish. [Pause]
Noble also suggests unafraid, not fearful, open. It also suggests strong, independent. It suggests al
those sort of qualities. So Johnson is saying that it is not an ordinary mind that can real y experience
friendship. Friendship is a spiritual quality, it can be experienced only by someone who has a noble
mind, who takes delight in and pride in friendship. [Pause]
And then he says: 'To Men and Angels only given, to al the lower world denied.' He's saying, in effect,
you don't find friendship in the sense in which he uses the term among animals. It's a specifical y
human quality, but not even that, it's not an ordinary human quality, it's a quality that can be ascribed
only to the noble mind, to the noble person, because it's a quality that comes from heaven. It's only the
True Individual, we might say, who can appreciate friendship. And an animal, an undeveloped man is
not a True Individual. Why do you think this is that in our language only a True Individual can appreciate
friendship, only a true individual can be a friend? Wel , "A man's best friend is his dog or his mother!"
But clearly one is using the term in a different sense here. Can a dog real y be a friend?
A Voice: A dog can be loyal.
S: A dog can be loyal, and loyalty is certainly one of the qualities of a friend, but can a dog be a friend?
Ratnaprabha: Seems to be some.. this sort of free exchange between equals you were talking about
is missing, isn't it?
S: Yes, wel , can a dog understand you, understand you ful y anyway?
Subhadra: He does understand part of you, he relates to you, a small part of you.
S: If you have a friend, are you looking just for loyalty? Are you looking just for a very smal portion of
understanding. I mean what are you looking for in a friend?
Vajrananda: I think probably what eggs people on to say that a man's best friend is a dog is
something to do with some dogs' ability to be a sort of unswervingly affectionate.
S: Yes. They don't give you a fierce friendship, they give you only tail-wagging friendship.
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Doctor Samuel Johnson's "An Ode to Friendship" Seminar
Page 1 Vajrananda: And ...